> At some level, everything is political
Every workplace has “office politics” - e.g. managers fighting over which team does what or which projects get funded. Even community organisations, hobby groups, kids sports teams, volunteer groups, churches/synagogues/mosques/etc, open source projects, inevitably end up with politics of this kind. You might call this “private politics”, the internal politics of private organisations, whether for-profit or not-for-profit
But that’s a rather different thing from public politics, electoral politics, political parties and candidates, lobbying for or against legislation, etc. Every workplace has private politics but not every workplace has public politics. If the job itself doesn’t explicitly intersect with the publicly political (e.g. you work for a political party, elected official, political consulting firm, activist group, etc), then how much presence public politics has really comes down to the norms and culture of the workplace, which are largely up to the senior leadership (although the wider background culture also plays some role-certain professions/industries tend to have a built-in political lean, at least in some countries, so if the senior leadership doesn’t push neutrality in publicly politics as a norm, that lean may determine the norm de facto)
In practice, a lot of the time when people say “political”, they mean the “public politics” which only explicitly exists in some spaces, not the “private politics” which is universal. To respond by pointing out that “private politics” is indeed (near-)universal, or that public politics ends up touching implicitly on a lot of things that aren’t explicitly involved in it, is turning the conversation into a pointless game of semantics by ignoring what the person you are responding to is actually using the word “political” to mean